Days before an investigation report into former Gov. Sarah Palin
was to be made public in Alaska, lawyers in North Texas filed an
emergency lawsuit to try to stop its release.

The suit came from the Plano-based Liberty Institute, a group
that gained prominence by fighting to allow the distribution of
religious-themed candy cane pens in local public schools.

In recent years, Liberty has moved to extend its reach and has
tapped into the growing field of Christian legal advocacy. It has
become involved in national conservative causes from a Mojave
Desert cross to the National Day of Prayer. Along the way, the
nonprofit's annual budget has quadrupled to more $2 million. It has
merged with its parent policy organization endorsed by evangelist
James Dobson, opened an Austin office and relocated its
headquarters to a building for Christian ministries.

"A lot of people say that it's about time that somebody is
actually out there to make sure and hold us back to the
Constitution and the principles upon which the country was based,"
said Liberty's president, Kelly J. Shackelford, who says the group
relies on 20 full-time staffers and hundreds of volunteer lawyers
across the country.

Since its inception in 1997, Liberty has been a thorn in the
side of some Texas cities and school districts, filing dozens of
suits over what Shackelford sees as the overreach of government and
its discrimination against religion and personal expression.

Most cases cover First Amendment and religious issues, from
Plano zoning variance laws that barred a church from opening to a
Greenville ISD teacher who said the district discriminated against
her because her children attended private school.

"As the government gets bigger, bigger and bigger and gains more
power, there is more and more need for protection," Shackelford
said. "As the government grows, it's going to, sometimes by
accident or sometimes intentionally, run completely roughshod over
freedoms."

And while Liberty has grown, it remains a bit player on First
Amendment and conservative Christian issues. Similar groups, such
as the American Center for Law and Justice in Washington, D.C.,
have much bigger budgets and handle larger cases.

Still, Liberty has garnered some critics, including one who says
its mission isn't as altruistic as it might sound.

"They exist for two reasons: To push a conservative agenda and
to gain attorney fees, to make money," said Dennis Eichelbaum, a
school law attorney who defended the Greenville district in a case
against Liberty. "Do I think that there is a hidden agenda?
Yes."

Tenfold growth

A look at Liberty's central Plano offices shows signs of how far
the group has come.

Its base is in The Hope Center, home to 44 evangelical groups.
Its staff has grown tenfold since its founding, and a hallway is
lined with about a dozen framed newspaper articles that mention the
institute or cases it championed.

In the Palin case, Liberty represented a handful of Alaska state
legislators who sought to block the release of a report that said
the governor abused her power by pushing for the firing of a state
trooper once married to her sister. Liberty's September 2008
lawsuit was rejected, a decision that was upheld by the Alaska
Supreme Court.

This past year, the group represented the Veterans of Foreign
Wars in a case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court about whether a
cross can be placed on government property in the Mojave Desert.
Earlier this month, Liberty, which was representing Dobson's Focus
on the Family and other such groups, filed a friend of the court
brief in a case on the legality of the National Day of Prayer.

And Shackelford and Liberty are defending Hannah Giles, a
conservative activist who posed as a prostitute for hidden-camera
videos recorded at offices of the community organizing group
Acorn.

Aiming at ACLU

Shackelford and others at Liberty don't excuse their efforts to
counterbalance groups they see as being on the opposite end of the
political spectrum. The top target: The American Civil Liberties
Union.

Shackelford accused the ACLU, a favorite enemy of the political
and religious right, of trying to change the Constitution through
lawsuits and activist judges.

"We really believe in free speech and freedom of association for
everybody, even people we disagree with," said Shackelford, 47, who
grew up in Nashville, Tenn., and graduated from Baylor University.
"We think they get off the rails when it comes to religious speech
or religious beliefs."

Lisa Graybill, the ACLU Foundation of Texas' legal director,
said that her group has a good working relationship with Liberty
and that they disagree mainly about only a portion of the First
Amendment - the establishment clause about religion. Both groups
argue that they are defending religious rights.

Liberty and similar groups try to present themselves as mirror
counterparts to the ACLU. But the political and religious-right
legal groups practice the same type of law they accuse the ACLU of
abusing, said Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at the left-leaning
think tank Political Research Associates, near Boston.

"These folks complain all the time of activist judges, but these
are activist lawsuits," he said. "They represent a very minority
view of how constitutional law was drafted and should be
applied."

Despite Liberty's expansion, the group and Shackelford are still
perhaps most recognized for a case involving Christian-themed candy
cane pens. A lawsuit that Liberty filed against Plano ISD in 2005
for not allowing students to distribute them and other religious
materials at school has yet to go to trial.

Legal fees questioned

Hiram Sasser, Liberty's litigation director, said suing
government entities is a challenge because they have "infinite"
resources. Yet Liberty claims more than a 90 percent success
rate.

"You have to be nuts to practice in this area of the law,"
Sasser said. "But someone has to do it."

But Eichelbaum said that the group drains money from
cash-strapped school districts and cities. Liberty and its pro bono
attorneys are paid if they win a case and receive legal fees.

In the Greenville ISD case, the lawyer representing Liberty,
Charles Bundren, claimed more than $1.2 million in legal fees
before the trial started, according to court documents, and
Shackelford asked for an additional $113,000.

Senior federal Judge Barefoot Sanders reviewed those fees and
concluded that they were the "most unreasonable fee application
this Court has reviewed in 25 years on the district bench."

Sanders (who died in 2008) struck down Shackelford's request and
lowered Bundren's fees to $109,000.

Shackelford defended the fee requests, saying that another judge
later decided not to completely accept Sanders' recommendations.
However, Bundren later received fell far less in legal fees than
his initial request.

'Natural evolution'

In the field of conservative Christian legal advocacy,
Shackelford and others may wield less influence than Jay Sekulow,
chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, a
conservative public interest law firm founded by televangliest Pat
Robertson.

Yet Sekulow said he has watched Liberty and Shackelford's expand
their reach, which he describes as the "natural evolution" of their
work.

"I have been doing this for 26 years, and there are so many
cases that no one group can handle them all," he said.

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